I prepared a tasting earlier in the week for Gary Lincoff’s lecture on mushrooms at the American Museum of Natural History: Marinated Maitake with Scallops, Chicken Canzanese with Morels, and Cheesecake Bars with Candy Cap Syrup (recipes below). I also spoke a bit about cooking mushrooms and the kooky mushroom hunting culture, but I realize now that the audience would have benefited more had I offered up basic generalizations. (Ah, the curse of hindsight!) So in an attempt to redeem myself, here’s what I know about cooking mushrooms.

Cultivated enoki

There are two categories out there: wild and cultivated. New cultivars are on the market that you used to only find in the wild, like maitake (hen of the woods) and royal trumpets, as are mushrooms long cultivated in the Far East, like wood ear and enoki, and more wild varieties are showing up in specialty stores, like blewets and black trumpets. In general wild mushrooms are more intensely flavored, benefiting as they probably do from their soil and bacterial symbionts, but the cultivated varieties are excellent, too.